Swift on the Server

Talk about Swift on the Server for Google Dev Fest Düsseldorf 2016

Transcript

1. DÜSSELDORF
2. SWIFT? ON THE SERVER?
3. ABOUT ME Benedikt Terhechte Indie Developer macOS & iOS @terhechte appventure.me
4. SERVER DEVELOPMENT ➤ Worked many years as a backend developer ➤ Kept an active interest in server development afterwards ➤ Developed in / for ➤ Google App Engine ➤ Python + Django ➤ Scala + Scalatra ➤ Clojure ➤ Go + Revel ➤ Lua + Openresty ➤ PHP + Symfony
5. SWIFT?
7. HISTORY ➤ Original Release (closed source) June 2014 ➤ Open Source (Apache 2.0) since December 2015 ➤ Current Version 3.0.1 ➤ New language for Apple’s complete ecosystem ➤ Spearheaded by Chris Lattner (LLVM, Clang)
8. TARGETS ➤ Officially Fully Supported ➤ iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS ➤ Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 16.04 ➤ Unofficially Fully Supported ➤ Debian, Arch Linux, Fedora, CentOS ➤ FreeBSD 11.0 ➤ Partial Support ➤ Android ➤ Windows
9. SWIFT, THE LANGUAGE
10. MODERN FEATURES ➤ Value Types (Structs, Strings, Numbers, Arrays, Dictionaries) ➤ Reference Types (Classes) ➤ Optionals & Syntactic Sugar ➤ Strong Types & Generics ➤ Protocols (“Interfaces”) & Protocol Extensions (“Traits”) ➤ Composition & Inheritance ➤ Closures / Functions are types ➤ Pattern Matching ➤ Tuples
11. MODERN FEATURES ➤ Automatic Retain Counting (No GC) ➤ Safety by default ➤ Algebraic Data Types (Enums with associated data) ➤ Full Unicode Support ➤ Error handling via Non-Unwinding Exceptions ➤ Functional Programming Constructs ➤ Comes with a REPL (Commandline) & Playgrounds (Xcode) ➤ Static & Dynamic Dispatch
12. INTRODUCTION
13. INTRODUCTION
14. INTRODUCTION
15. INTRODUCTION
16. INTRODUCTION
17. INTRODUCTION
20. OPTIONALS
21. GENERICS
22. GENERICS
23. PROTOCOL ORIENTED PROGRAMMING
24. PROTOCOL ORIENTED PROGRAMMING
25. PROTOCOL ORIENTED PROGRAMMING
26. PROTOCOL ORIENTED PROGRAMMING
27. ENUMS & PATTERNS
28. ENUMS & PATTERNS
29. ERROR HANDLING
30. ERROR HANDLING
31. FUTURE FEATURES (I.E. ON AGENDA FOR SWIFT 4 OR 5) ➤ Coroutines / CSP ➤ Optional Strong Memory Lifetimes like Rust ➤ Extended Generics Support (Existentials) ➤ Performance Improvements ➤ Reflection & Dynamic Features
32. SWIFT ON THE SERVER? WHY? There are already tons of solutions
33. GO
34. GO THREE REASONS
35. “There’s a real desire among developers for less fractionalization in programming -Kyle Jessup Founder, Perfect Framework
36. CURRENT FULL STACK SETUP ➤ Ruby on the Server ➤ Javascript in the Frontend ➤ SQL in the Database ➤ CSS & HTML in the Frontend ➤ Java for the Android solution ➤ Swift for the iOS Solution ➤ Thats 7 Languages! ➤ New devices, new paradigms (VR), more languages ➤ Should stride for less 1.
37. CODE SHARING ➤ Builds upon the first reason ➤ Share code among different targets ➤ Saves time ➤ Less Bugs 2.
38. SWIFT ➤ Swift is a great language ➤ Faster than Ruby or Python ➤ Consumes less memory ➤ Strong Types ➤ Modern language features 3.
39. SWIFT WEB FRAMEWORKS
40. PERFECT ➤ 8600 GitHub Stars ➤ "Perfect is a complete and powerful toolbox, framework, and application server for Linux, iOS, and macOS (OS X)."
41. VAPOR ➤ 7000 Github Stars ➤ "A pure Swift & modular Web Framework that works on iOS, macOS, and Ubuntu." ➤ Very modular ➤ Beautiful API
42. KITURA ➤ 5000 Github Stars ➤ "Kitura is a web framework and web server that is created for web services written in Swift." ➤ Backed by IBM ➤ IBM is investing heavily into Kitura ➤ Kitura's developers also contribute to Swift in order to improve Linux support
43. MANY MORE ➤ Swifton: https://github.com/necolt/Swifton (1994 Stars) ➤ Zewo: https://github.com/Zewo/Zewo (1215 Stars) ➤ Blackfish: https://github.com/elliottminns/blackfish (924 Stars) ➤ Slimane: https://github.com/noppoMan/Slimane (61 Stars) ➤ Tailor: https://github.com/brownleej/tailor (55 Stars) ➤ Kunugi: https://github.com/novi/Kunugi (36 Stars) ➤ Quark: https://github.com/QuarkX/Quark (31 Stars)
44. FIRST VERDICT ➤ The major frameworks have around 20.000 GitHub Stars together ➤ Ruby on Rails has 31.000 ➤ Huge interest (already) in Swift Server development
45. WEB FRAMEWORK FEATURES
46. ➤ All Swift frameworks support different features ➤ Depending on your use case, this may help you decide on a framework ➤ Most frameworks are still kinda in development or 1.0 ➤ Many features are only partially implemented
47. ➤ Take with grain of salt ➤ Status quo may already have changed between my research and this talk
48. USER AUTHENTICATION ➤ Log a user in, keep a user logged in, log him out, access a user ➤ Via email / password or i.e. Google / Twitter / Facebook (OAuth) ➤ Perfect, Vapor
49. RAW DATABASE SUPPORT Feature MySQL PostgreSQL MongoDB Redis RethinkDB Cassandra CouchDB Perfect Vapor Kitura Zewo
50. ORM ➤ Spares you from writing custom SQL ➤ Vapor
51. ROUTING ➤ Interpret visitor input URLs ➤ Parse them ➤ Retrieve parameters ➤ /users/23/posts/144/ comments/12 ➤ user_id: 23, post_id: 144, comment_id: 12 ➤ Perfect, Vapor, Kitura, Zewo
52. CRUD ➤ Create, Read, Update, Delete ➤ Inherit from a class to automatically gain CRUD ➤ Auto-generate routes ➤ /users/:id/delete ➤ Vapor
53. SESSIONS ➤ Sessions allow associating stateful information with individual visitors ➤ Perfect, Vapor, Kitura, Zewo
54. LOGIC-LESS TEMPLATES ➤ Syntax for search & replace placeholders in HTML Files ➤ Templates without the notion of if / else conditions ➤ “Mustache” ➤ Perfect, Vapor, Kitura, Zewo <h1>{{header}}</h1> {{#empty}} <p>The list is empty.</p> {{/empty}}
55. TURING TEMPLATES ➤ Conditionals ➤ Loops ➤ Vapor #if(entering) { Hello, #(friend-name)! } ##else() { Goodbye, #(friend-name)! } #loop(friends, "friend") { <li><b>#(friend.name)</b></li> }
56. MIDDLEWARE ➤ Custom code which can be injected to run before and after each request / response cycle ➤ Examples: ➤ Authentication ➤ Security ➤ Caching ➤ Perfect, Vapor, Kitura, Zewo
57. LOCALISATION ➤ drop.localization[lang, "welcome", "title"], ➤ Vapor "welcome": { "title": "Welcome!", "body": "A web framework" } "welcome": { "title": "¡Bienvenidos!", "body": "Un framework web" }
58. WEB SOCKETS ➤ “Full-Duplex communication channels over single TCP connection” ➤ Real-time data transfer from / to server ➤ Perfect, Vapor, Zewo
59. DEPLOYMENT Method Heroku Docker AWS Apache Nginx Blue mix DigitalOcean Perfect Vapor Kitura Zewo
60. MISC ➤ File Uploads ➤ JSON Encoding / Decoding ➤ File Uploads ➤ Perfect, Vapor, Kitura, Zewo
61. MISSING FEATURES ➤ Database Migrations ➤ Scaffolding ➤ Asset Pipeline / Build System ➤ Admin Tool ➤ Sitemaps ➤ Hot Reloading of Code ➤ Reloading of HTML / CSS / JS
62. PERFORMANCE
63. BENCHMARKS ARE DIFFICULT ➤ There’re Swift Web Framework benchmark, but they were performed on macOS. The system and performance differs from Linux. Swift is better optimised for macOS ➤ Others only compare limited frameworks or lack the knowledge to implement the benchmark test correctly in the comparison languages ➤ One side will always be unhappy about the comparison
64. TECH EMPOWER BENCHMARK ➤ It compares ~40 frameworks. ➤ It has very strict rules ➤ Optimized & tested heavily by lots of users ➤ www.techempower.com/ benchmarks
65. STATE ➤ I’ve implemented the Techempower Plaintext benchmarks for Perfect, Kitura, and Vapor ➤ I’ve then compared Swift Web Frameworks to the competition as tested by Techempower ➤ Keep in mind ➤ Swift for Linux is new. ➤ The frameworks are all in development ➤ I’ve tested this on other hardware than Techempower ($5 digital ocean droplet vs. 40 Core 32GB Ram Monster) ➤ I ran less tests (only plaintext)
66. THE SWIFT FRAMEWORKS 0 70000 140000 210000 280000 Swift: Vapor Swift: Kitura Swift: Perfect Plaintext
67. SWIFT VS OTHER “MODERN” LANGUAGES Ruby: rails-unicorn Rust: iron Groovy: grails Javascript: express Javascript: nodejs Clojure: http-kit Elixir: Cowboy Swift: Vapor Swift: Kitura Scala: Play2 Swift: Perfect Go: falcore Go: gin Go: Raw 0 250000 500000 750000 1000000 Plaintext
68. SWIFT VS THE FASTEST Clojure: http-kit Elixir: Cowboy Swift: Vapor Swift: Kitura php5 Java: Play2 Scala: Play2 Swift: Perfect Python: bottle Lua: lapis Go: falcore Python: falcon ur/web Go: gin Go: Raw Lua: openresty Java: servlet Java: vertx Java: netty 0 1250000 2500000 3750000 5000000 Plaintext
69. PHP laravel Erlang: chicagoboss Ruby: rails-unicorn PHP: hhvm Ruby: sinatra-trinidad Java: ninja-standalone Rust: iron Python: flask Groovy: grails Javascript: express Javascript: nodejs Clojure: http-kit Elixir: Cowboy Swift: Vapor Swift: Kitura php5 Java: Play2 Scala: Play2 Swift: Perfect 0 75000 150000 225000 300000 Plaintext SWIFT VS COMMON SOLUTIONS
70. Vapor (currently) offers the most features Some code examples of common features with Vapor
71. HELLO WORLD
72. TYPE-SAFE ROUTING Type-safe routing. This will only be called if the `number` parameter is indeed an integer
73. RESPONSE CONFORMANCE PROTOCOL
74. RESPONSE CONFORMANCE PROTOCOL
75. RESPONSE CONFORMANCE PROTOCOL
76. DEFAULT ARGUMENTS
77. VALIDATION
78. MIDDLEWARE
79. MIDDLEWARE
80. MIDDLEWARE
81. AUTHENTICATION
82. AUTHENTICATION
83. AUTHENTICATION
84. AUTHENTICATION
85. CHUNKED DATA
86. WEB SOCKETS
87. OUTLOOK
88. SHARE ALL THE CODE??
89. SHARE ALL THE CODE?? NO
90. HOWEVER
91. SWIFT ON ANDROID ➤ 2 Facebook People and several other open source contributors ➤ Slowly evolving ➤ Uses JNI ➤ Alternative to C++ ➤ No auto-generated wrapper code yet ➤ Painful to use ➤ Give it another year
92. SWIFT ON THE SERVER ➤ Early, but exciting ➤ Up until Swift 3 GM, Swift changed a lot ➤ Frameworks had to adopt to these changes ➤ Frameworks are still changing. Not stable yet. ➤ Outdated examples, docs, and tutorials
93. SECURITY ➤ Don’t use it for anything vaguely important
94. SHOULD YOU CHOOSE SWIFT? ➤ It depends ➤ On how much frontend code you have ➤ On how polyglot your team is ➤ On how much shared code you expect ➤ Whether the future direction of Swift aligns with business
95. DOCUMENTATION ➤ Documentation is lacking for all frameworks. ➤ Possible approaches: ➤ Scout GitHub for Sample repos (though oftentimes they're outdated) ➤ Read unit tests ➤ Read Pull Requests for features. Oftentimes, they include basic usage instructions ➤ Read the source
96. SOME ALTERNATIVES ➤ Kotlin (targets JVM & Javascript) ➤ Scala (targets JVM, Mobile / Native & Javascript) ➤ Javascript + Node + React / React Native ➤ C# (targets CLR, Mobile Devices & Desktops) ➤ C++ 17 (targets Server, Mobile & Emscripten / Javascript) ➤ Rust (targets Server, Mobile & Emscripten / Javascript) ➤ OCaml (targets Server, Mobile & Javascript) ➤ Java + bugVM (RoboVM) (targets Mobile, native macOS / Ubuntu, JVM, Javascript)
97. HIRUNDO - SWIFT DISCUSSION & MORE STYLEMAC.COM/HIRUNDO
98. THANKS! ➤ Will post links to Slides & Code on Twitter: @terhechte